9. Gallewella

Helen writes,
Today we had a remarkable adventure!
We were told by the Sri Lankan authorities that neither May nor Roshan’s mothers were traceable so we gave up on the idea of actually meeting them during our visit.
But on the way to our next stop at Dambulla we asked Neil, our driver, if he could stop at the home village of Roshan’s birth Mother so we could investigate.
I knew she had lived in the grounds of a Buddhist temple in a little town called Gallewella on the road to Dambulla.
Neil was sceptical about finding anyone who might know of her as it was such a long time ago That she had lived there and we didn’t have the address of the actual temple but ..... Helen, the Determined Woman persisted and I asked Neil to stop at the temples we found on the route and make enquiries.
At the first one - puzzled faces all round.
But at the second, where we had long conversations with aged and venerable Buddhist monks - Neil acting as translator - and a chattering clutch of very young novitiates eager to practise their English, there was a glimmer of recognition from a visiting tuk-tuk driver that rapidly sent him and Neil off into the town to find another tuk-tuk driver who turned out to be Roshan’s older brother, Priyantha!

He looks such a lot like Roshan and frowns with a puzzled, bewildered expression in exactly the same way that Roshan does.

Possibly tomorrow at 11am we may meet up with his birth mother once again after nearly 20 years!

8. The road to Dambulla

Well, a long, hot and eventful journey from Negombo to Dambulla yesterday.

(More on the events later from Helen.)

A day of hard and dusty driving but fortunately we have the benefit of powerful air-con in our people carrier.

May took many photos of the sights and scenes of daily life of as we drove ever onward into the Sri Lankan interior. I'll try to upload them to a flikr account if we have time in the schedule. Broadband is a bit erratic and very slow at times.

The Hotel Kandalama, where we are staying, is an unbelievable place. It is built into and around a high rocky, jungle-clad hill overlooking a huge tank (man-made reservoir – I say man-made but it was made by men living in a previous millennium so there is nothing artificial about it.)

The Kandalama

 Some background info on
The Hotel

The building is close to half a km long in total, winding it’s way round the hill, and has 6 floors but is as unlike a concrete monolithic edifice as it is possible to get. The jungle is never more than a few feet away at any point.

We woke this morning to find monkeys on one of our balconies.

Yes, we have two balconies. We booked standard rooms at all the hotels on our tour but Rebecca at Audley’s managed to get them all upgraded to deluxe rooms at no extra cost. She’s a marvel.

When we arrived at the Kandalama they only had one deluxe room available so they upgraded us again to a suite. At first May insisted that she and mum had the suite but decided on reflection that she preferred the panoramic lake view from the one deluxe room to the suite’s less exotic jungle view, so poor old Roshan and me had to settle for the suite.

We aren’t complaining. The Jacuzzi is huge.

There is a tri-nation cricket tournament going on at the moment and the hotel is the base for the Sri Lankan, Indian and New Zealand teams. We are constantly coming across people I’ve seen playing on Sky Sports.

It’s a strange, unworldly experience to keep bumping into strangers who look so familiar.

Today Sri Lanka are playing new Zealand, so the hotel is quieter but this evening there will be one happy group and one a little more downcast, I expect.
I was talking to one of the Sri Lankan coaches (an Aussie) last night and he’s very confident of a Lankan win. We’ll see later.

All the players and their support staff for all three teams seem a friendly bunch despite their great fame and the reverence they are universally held in, here in Sri Lanka, which is a country utterly besotted with cricket.
It’s a marvellous place.

Me and my new friend, Lasith Malinga.

Lasith Malinga 

7. In Negombo

Helen writes,
Life in Economy wasn’t so bad! After a short while on board we were given food and drink.
All was fine until the plane converted to Sri Lankan time and after only a few hours sleep in the darkened plane the lights were turned on and cold flannels distributed to all of us to wake us up.
I looked at my watch. It was 2am.
We were served breakfast then we landed. In local time it was 8 am. We were very jet lagged! We definitely needed to relax and acclimatise.
Our driver, Neil, met us at the airport and took us to our first hotel called ‘the Beach’ at Negombo.
It is spectacular! There are palm lined beaches and a crashing surf beyond. We explored the hotel and the local beach, enjoyed fantastic local cuisine and cocktails in the evening on the terrace.
May had a King Coconut, which is a whole coconut, pierced and drunk through a straw into the fruit.

 

The three intrepid travelers take time out for a welcome pedicure. Dad just foot the bill.

Today our Sri Lankan friend, Chuli da Silva, came to see us.
She stayed for dinner in the evening and we enjoyed a Sri Lankan buffet on the terrace of the hotel. She thought the food was great so we feel we’ve been eating the authentic cuisine.
It was great to see her after 20 years.
She is about to start work in Dacca, Bangladesh where she is curating/ organising a huge event in photography. She’s just as enthusiastic as I remember she was all those years ago when we first met in Brunei.
She took lots of photos, especially of May and Roshan. She’s always been very interested in their lives as she was instrumental in our adoption of them originally.
We may see her again in Galle as she’s there at the same time as us - fingers crossed.

6 Heathrow Blues

Well I did my best.

I asked them at the check-in desk and I asked again at boarding.

I asked the kind young stewardess who showed me to my capacious and luxurious seat and she asked the smiling dapper cabin manager who then came to see me. So I asked him too.

He went off and asked the ultimate arbiter, the flight manager who also came to see me and, yes you’ve guessed it, I asked him.

Oh how I asked him. I used all the obsequious charm I’d picked up during my two years in Northern Borneo. I smiled my Mackworth grin and shook his hand like I was his long lost son.

And he said YES!  It certainly was perfectly possible for my family to join me in the exclusive business class cabin. It was only half full, after all and he could quite understand how I might be lonely parted from them for a full ten hour flight. All I had to do was pay a £550 upgrade fee – each - and they could leave the cramped hell I’d consigned them to and scamper forward to the roomy acres at the front of the plane.

As you might guess, I declined his kind offer and settled disconsolately into my deeply padded recliner and tried to come to terms with my failure as I tucked into my Tian of Seafood with Mesculine salad, followed by Fillet of Beef with green peppercorn sauce served onto china plates (silver service, of course) and a very pleasant, if a little fruity, cheeky glass of red.

Somehow I recovered. I’m not sure Helen, May and Roshan have though.

5 - Just a week to go now ........

This is where we start off. Met at the airport and gently chauffeured to our first hotel

The first port of call -

Three days of pampered luxury on the agenda to help us get acclimatised and to re adjust our internal clocks before we get down to the hard traveling to come later.

Exactly how many deeply alcoholic coconut cocktails and exotic nibbles served by the pool might be considered to constitute adequate preparation, I wonder?

The Beach, Negombo 

4. Weather

View Detailed 9 Day Weather Forecasts for Colombo, webcams, weather maps & more at Weather-Forecast.com

3. Preparations

Preparations for our great adventure continue apace.

May is working hard to augment her wardrobe and doing plenty of overtime at Waitrose to swell her funds. She intends to create a record of the visit incorporating photos, video and of course, sketches. So she will be dragging her macbook, stills camera and video camera around with her, along with her sketching materials. She'll have muscles on her muscles when she gets home.

Roshan has begun to look at the various guidebooks that are scattered around the house and is currently wrestling mentally with whether he wants to actually ride on an elephant or just look at it, gingerly, from a distance.  I’m betting on the latter option but he might yet surprise us.

I doubt I’ll personally get any closer to an elephant than a glass of Tusker beer and then only if we end up in Kenya by mistake.

Helen is counting down towards the end of term and is as preoccupied with her excessive workload as she is always forced to be at this time every year. The upcoming trip is the light at the end of that particular tunnel for her.

Meanwhile, I’ve paid the balance of the bill (a severe blow to the finances) and got a prepaid Mastercard (to avoid extortionate bank charges) for when we get the urge to spend. An urge I can’t see any of my family remotely resisting.

We’ve all had the necessary jabs and to be on the safe side I’ve had a dodgy filling done, an in-growing toenail stripped, a cinematic exploration of my large intestines which, thankfully, gave the all-clear and am due a couple of cortisone injections into my knees just before we go. My neck and spine will have to take their chances, I'm afraid.

We’ve got the required adapter plugs  for recharging netbooks, cameras and mp3 players and something like a years supply of DEET. 
So, true to the spirit of Baden Powell, we intend to "be prepared".

Just five weeks to go now and the excitement is, palpably, beginning to mount.